2019

The priesthood of Christ and of his apostles and their successors and assistants, who share in Christ’s priesthood, is the answer to the imperfection in the Levitical priesthood of the Old Covenant. Initially, before the Levitical priesthood, the firstborn son functioned as the priest in the family. The Book of Exodus reports that, at Sinai, God limited the priesthood to the descendants of Aaron in the tribe of Levi, although that is generally understood to be the theological understanding of the time when the writing of the Torah was completed.

As a Catholic, the question of celibacy is important to me. It is one of those Catholic “peculiarities”, like the Papacy and our colorful history and our challenging moral teachings, that provoke either the admiration or the contempt of the outside world. 

The Most Holy Eucharist is the body and blood of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (cf. Matt 26:26-28; John 6:55). Because this sacrament is the fullness and substance of His divinity and humanity, His presence demands proper adoration.  

Papal authority has divine origin. The Lord made Simon alone, whom He named Peter, the “rock” of His Church. He gave him the keys of His Church and instituted him shepherd of the whole flock. As Isaiah 43:1 points out, the act of naming claims the one named. This “claiming” includes the recognition of a particular purpose or mission.

This is the story of how “God came to our assistance and made haste to help us” (Psalm 69) amid the one trial every parent fears most. And He did so using ordinary events, people, and a striking series of coincidences. G.K. Chesterton called coincidences “spiritual puns,” an insight as absorbing as it is relevant to our story. I’ll use only the first names of those involved.

The Catholic Church, precisely on account of what sets her apart from every other community of faith, stands toward them as a foundation, root and source of the supernatural life that is common to them. A basic appreciation of this dynamism demands an etiological analysis. The question to be answered is this: how is the Catholic Church causally related to her separated brothers in Christ?  

I personally believe (along with most other Christians) that the God who created the world, the God of Genesis, the cause of the Big Bang, the First Mover, and all the other things described by Aquinas’s proofs, can work miracles. But I also believe that this is not his ordinary mode of operation. Ordinarily, God works through the natural world he made. Miracles are done in reference to human beings and in the context of revealed faith, and are by definition extremely rare.

There are many different questions that need to be asked about God, and they are all distinct from each other. People fall into logical black holes when they fail to understand this simple point. Proving that God exists is not at all the same as proving that he (assuming this is the proper pronoun to use) is omnipotent, or omniscient, or good, or even that there is one of him. These are all completely different questions, whose arguments may or may not be related. If I attempt to prove that God exists, that argument should be examined according to what it is attempting to do, not anything else. If that argument does not prove that there is one God, or that God is all-powerful, or anything else, that is not a problem.